Our long national nightmare is over, ladies and gentlemen. After nearly three months of lightly repackaged reruns, Ancient Aliens returns with a new season this Friday, July 24. There had been some confusion over the episode numbering, and I guess everyone involved gave up trying to keep it straight. The History Channel and H2 aired seventeen episodes under the banner of Season 7, of which 12 were retroactively declared Season 7 episodes for the DVD release, in stores tomorrow. I guess the other five were made part of Season 6, which runs anywhere from 19 to 28 episodes, depending on which count as “official.” However, according to the production company, Prometheus Entertainment, the original Season 7 episode order was for 20 episodes. Perhaps the “Ultimate Evidence” reruns counted toward the 20 for broadcast, but not DVD. (This only really matters for the confusing DVD marketing. Prometheus changed the latest DVD from “Season 7: Volume One” to “Season 7,” and I’m sure you don’t care about that.) Anyway, on Friday we’re starting fresh with Season 8, at the conclusion of which Ancient Aliens will be within spitting distance of In Search Of…’s record 144 episode run for the most episodes of a fringe history show in American television history.

It’s clear, though, that the Ancient Aliens staff and the History Channel see the show as disposable filler and are putting progressively less effort into it. History doesn’t bother to list Ancient Aliens on its password-protected press site (a sure sign it’s not expected to garner mainstream coverage), and just four days away from the premiere, neither History nor Prometheus Entertainment has bothered to provide an episode description for the ambiguously titled episode S08E01 “Aliens B.C.” Presumably, it’s about prehistoric alien encounters, and beyond that will it make a difference? While I was on the press site trying to find out about Ancient Aliens, I also sent a note to A+E Networks’ publicity department to see if I can get a press release about Scott Wolter’s new show, which is also notable in its absence from all of History’s publicity materials. But if you ever wanted to know anything about the various swamp people on the network, that can be arranged. While I’m waiting for the next tsunami of stupid to descend on us from Ancient Aliens, I’ve also been trying to do some more productive research. I’ve been in contact with one of the world’s leading experts on Islamic intellectual history in the medieval period, and he has generously agreed to help me figure out which medieval writers really said what about the mythic antediluvian pyramid builder Surid and his activities before the Flood. If we are lucky, this may solve questions of chronology and determine when the Surid myth emerged. If we are not lucky, it will prove that the state of the scholarly work on early Islamic historical manuscripts makes a clear chronology impossible. As most readers remember, a few days ago I discovered that Murtada ibn al-‘Afif, writing the thirteenth century, had noted that the ninth century astrologer Abu Ma‘shar had made reference to Surid in his book The Thousands, which would put the story as much as 100 years earlier than modern scholars assume. But here’s a weird detail I had overlooked. Murtada says that in a different book Abu Ma‘shar claimed that Surid had a dream of “the descent of the moon upon earth in the form of a woman; of the over-turning of the Earth with its inhabitants, and of the total eclipse of the Sun” (trans. J. Davies). This is unusual because no other version of the story that I knew said that the moon took a woman’s form to descend to earth. It’s probably a reference to the Greek misconception that Isis was a moon goddess.

At first I put it down to corruption in the text, or some other mistake. But then I found inexplicable confirmation in what previously had seemed like a garbled mistake in the Akhbar al-zaman, a text compiled from older material sometime between 904 and 1140 CE, and the most important early source for pyramid legends. This text gives the story of Surid’s vision in its standard form, but later on, in recapping it from a different source, says this: “He sent for his priests and astronomers and told them how he saw the sphere had descended to him in the guise of a woman, how the land with all its inhabitants had been overturned, and how the sun had been eclipsed” (my trans.). I’ll be damned but it’s the same text. This clearly points to an older source, such as Abu Ma‘shar, who is cited only a sentence earlier in the Akhbar al-zaman, that differs in its details from the other versions of the Surid story, and which the author of the Akhbar used without realizing there were differences with the source he followed elsewhere.

What’s interesting is that this version seems a lot closer to Greek Hermetic ideas, particularly if the moon woman is conceded to be the Greek interpretation of Isis. It’s a shame that not enough survives to see if this was the original form of the Surid legend.

I'll seriously consider starting a Surid-Isis-Mary Magdalene bloodline School. There are enough suckers out there who would fill my bank balance in return for my bullshit,

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Scarecrow

7/21/2015 02:26:36 am

Please tell me that Pierre Plantard is not the original source for this load of boloney
http://www.stclairresearch.com/content/news.html

159,083 likes

7/21/2015 03:25:57 am

https://www.facebook.com/SphinxofCarpathia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI7IQQLqO6Y

René Descartes

7/21/2015 04:04:47 am

'Regarding the spurious sciences, I thought I knew the worth of these sufficiently well to be able to avoid being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.' (Discourse on method).

This review of Bara's new book shared the link too. Pretty brutal takedown if you ask me.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R240BX6UTJW6I6/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1939149401&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

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Duke of URL

7/21/2015 06:50:35 am

Just read that column and was greatly impressed. Is there any way we can sic him on Scott Wolter?

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Shane Sullivan

7/20/2015 10:52:23 am

"... Season 8, at the conclusion of which Ancient Aliens will be within spitting distance of In Search Of…’s record 144 episode run for the most episodes of a fringe history show in American television history."

152 if you count the Mitch Pileggi version. And Don LaFontaine got to say his own name, so it had that going for it, which was nice.

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Clete

7/20/2015 12:22:28 pm

A group of us would get together and watch Ancient Aliens whenever a new episode was aired. Whenever the voice would say"Ancient Aliens Theorists say yes" to any moronic question we would all take a drink. By the end of the show we were all sloshed and their half-assed conclusions would actually begin to make sense, but you had to be drunk of high before they would.

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V

7/20/2015 04:35:28 pm

That sounds like a dangerous game. Weren't you courting alcohol poisoning that way?

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David Bradbury

7/20/2015 08:24:33 pm

I'm glad that you've found an expert to help you with the Surid problem. There's a world of difference between picking through words in a dictionary (which I can manage) and doing anything useful with an Arabic text (which I tried at the weekend and failed miserably).

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Tony Marino

7/20/2015 08:31:32 pm

Well,I heard "Ancient Aliens" is coming back. I can assume you're going to season eight. I wonder when you're going to do the other two seasons because it'll be interesting to see your opinion of them.

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Jack

7/20/2015 11:22:03 pm

Really... the series has ran out of stuff from the end of season 3...
i look forward to a future episode where HP lovecraft is being described as an Alien... :p abductee or whatever lol

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Zach

7/21/2015 09:59:47 am

I wouldn't be surprised if they did an episode on Helena Blavatsky. It seems like that's the direction this idiotic series is heading anyway by using the argument that there are telepathic Theosophical aliens communicating with humans.

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Shane Sullivan

7/21/2015 04:58:18 pm

Personally, I'm hoping for an episode that claims Pantagruel was really a spaceship because he had all those people living in his mouth, or how the flying, condiment-defecating pig from the fourth book was really an alien with a jetpack because "earth pigs don't fly!"

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.